The Artsy Fartsy Art Room: Jan Brett's The Mitten with 1st Grade

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Jan Brett's The Mitten with 1st Grade

Any chance I get to make connections to the core classrooms, I do it! When I found out first grade was doing an author study of Jan Brett I knew I had to jump on the chance to do something with one of her books.

I can statement: I can draw an animal from The Mitten using simple shapes

Day 1: The classes heard Jan Brett books from their teachers reading so I was really excited when I found this version of The Mitten read by Jan Brett herself on YouTube to change it up for them...

After the video I told them we were going to change the story by making the mitten decorative instead of white and they spent the rest of the time doing a crayon resist. Drawing a mitten was challenging for my 3rd graders (like crying in frustration challenging) so I made tracers for these kiddos. They could draw whatever they wanted on their mittens in crayon and had to pick one color to do a watercolor wash in over their drawings. If time allowed they practiced drawing the different animals from the story.

Day 2: To prep for this project I found an oval and traced in in the center of a 9x12 piece of paper for each of them to use as a starting point for their drawing. I made a drawing of each animal in the story using that same oval as the base and had the oval in red and the rest of the drawing in black so they could see how it was transformed into the different animals. I will dig them out and add a picture to add to the post later. I also did a demo for each of the more challenging ones on the document camera. I knew Jan Brett's beautiful illustrations might be hard for the kiddos to translate into their own drawings so I found a clip art version of each animal that simplified them and was easy to identify an oval as the base shape.

They chose one of the animals to be inside their mitten and after they were done drawing and coloring they cut both out, glued to black paper, and added some yarn for detailing on the mitten.

I selected this one to be on display for Youth Art Month at the library and I know it will be popular given that our Wisconsin Badgers are going to dominate in March Madness....